There were many exciting announcements at the Adobe MAX 2009 conference hosted in Los Angeles. As a Flash Developer in the MIH SWAT team, this year’s MAX was the perfect event for me to attend, as it focused on Flash Platform related news. In this post I give a rundown of the MAX 2009 Flash Platform news, but more importantly, I discuss what the announcements may mean for us in the future. These are all my own predictions and I would like to hear your thoughts and insights in the comments below.
Flash Player 10.1
This release of the flash player sees the first realisation of the Open Screen Project whereby all the partners aim to bring the interactive web to all devices. And which better platform than the Flash Platform to implement this. This is why this version of Flash Player 10.1 will be available for all major OS’s as well as smartphones. Yes – that means Flash will be playing games, movies, adding interactivity and more to web pages right on your mobile. This is a major step forward in using the internet on our smartphone, for all except one major player in the field, the Apple iPhone.
My prediction: Mobile will finally have the full web and this includes them in the web application target market. But the mobile internet far outweighs the PC internet market. This will mean websites will be optimised for mobile out the box. In fact it will become a standard to have a resizing version of your application so that it becomes easier to read on smaller screens. Since the device capabilities can be read in Flash, it would be able to adjust to whether its run on a mobile device or a PC.
Apple has decided not to have the Flash Player in its Safari mobile web browser. The mobile device sector is changing rapidly, specially with the introduction of Android. So my prediction is that either Apple brings Flash Player to its mobile Safari or the iPhone becomes the next “windows mobile” of its day.
Flash CS5 Professional compile to iPhone application
Developers will be able to compile a native iPhone application straight from Flash Professional CS5. So it is an iPhone application but created using Flash Professional. No longer do we need a Mac to create the application either, we can as easily create it on Windows. We can even create it using our beloved ActionScript 3 rather than Objective C. This does not mean that the application wont abide by the iPhone security rules, they still apply as they do to any other iPhone application. In many cases Flash allows certain features that break the rules for Apple’s security policies for iPhone applications – these features will be disabled when compiling to an iPhone application. An example of this is the way that the application will not be able to load an external .swf file. Another example is that writing to the camera is allowed but not displaying photos from the camera roll.
My prediction: This innovaiton will be welcomed by Flash developers. In the past writing an iPhone app meant learning a whole new language. This may even turn out to be the de-facto method for creating iPhone applications. We will definitely see more web applications being offered as iPhone apps, and it may become standard to offer Flash web applications as iPhone applications too.
AIR 2.0
Adobe Integrated Runtime(AIR) has been a great success. By January 2009 it had been installed more than 100 million times, and is currently around the 250 million mark. The big announcement regarding AIR is that it will be deployed on mobile as well. It will be installed just like a regular mobile application, and will appear to the user like a regular application. AIR 2.0 has more hooks into the native OS, and has the ability to create a native OS installer.
My prediction: The previous prediction applies here as well. It will become standard to have a mobile app to go with every AIR application. This will be another method of gathering stats, with the ability to get more information from users when they connect from AIR applications.
Because mobile devices offers more in terms interactivity, this could mean added functionality for web applications, for example: the poke feature on facebook could become a tickle (via vibrate) feature on the mobile version.
Summary
Now that Flash is going mobile it means we can finally have the full web experience on our mobile devices. This will complete the full circle of devices to which we can port our web applications. So this will mean develop once and deploy once to let users access your application from Windows, Mac, Linux, your smartphone browser, as a native app iPhone app, or as an AIR application, straight from the website! Now all we need are great ideas!
